All posts tagged: details

Carlo Scarpa

Published by

In Robert McCarter’s Carlo Scarpa monograph, Austrian architect Peter Noever tells an astonishing tale. In 1974, he and Scarpa toured the Adolf Loos made American Bar in Vienna. The moment they entered Scarpa started evaluating the space. He ordered champagne for the ladies…… who were present and a measuring tape for himself. Scarpa then continued to measure everything down to the exact millimeter. When completed he announced the space to be of “singular spiritual and emotional quality.” This is precisely how I envision McCarter analyze the work of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa—measuring tape in hand.  In this substantial volume, McCarter leads us by the hand through Scarpa’s achievements. He gives us a survey that is both vast, and in the spirit of Scarpa, meticulously detailed. Carlo Scarpa is a mystery. He has never achieved the iconic status in this country reserved for Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, or Louis Kahn, yet Scarpa was revered by all of them. McCarter’s comprehensive tome has the capacity to change this. With over 350 drawings, photos and plans …

Brion Cemetery Meditation Pavilion – Carlo Scarpa

Published by

Carlo Scarpa was one of the second generation of Modern architects – however, as a son of Venice, he was sensitive to that city’s old-fashioned culture (unlike most modernists), and made his reputation through a number of commissions and renovations in which he used Modern methods and spatial concepts to transform Venice, rather than crudely eliminate its ancient identity. He understood that the past is not dead and that we in the present must engage and intertwine with it. Scarpa did not restrict himself to Venice, however. Indeed, perhaps his most visited and well-known work was the last he completed in his lifetime – the Brion Cemetery at San Vito D’Altivole, a small village not far from the Dolomite Mountains. This was the country of Giuseppe Brion, founder of the prestigious Brionvega electronics company, who Scarpa admired as a man of the people, who had “started from the bottom”, as well as for the design quality of his products, many of which are museum pieces today. When Brion died in 1968, his family bought a …

Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works Volume 5

Published by

It’s 23 years since the first of Peter Buchanan’s monumental volumes on Renzo Piano appeared. The latest edition features projects completed between 2000 and 2007, plus several that are recently realised, including the London Bridge Tower (‘The Shard’). In total, the books record more than 30 years of achievement since Piano and his then partner Richard Rogers achieved instant superstar status with the completion of Paris’ Pompidou Centre in 1977. It is hard to think of any project in the intervening years that has failed to meet the expectations of Piano’s multitude of admirers. He is the archetypal architect’s architect, a pioneer who leads where others follow–for example, in the virtuoso use of materials such as timber, stone, brick and glass. Among the 14 projects recorded here (in meticulous detail, in tune with the expansive tone of the Phaidon series) are the New York Times office tower, Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church. Also included are the final phases of the Lingotto Factory Conversion …